Matti Friedman: When We Started to Lie

Exactly ten years ago, during an Israel-Hamas war that seemed major at the time but seems minor now, I published two essays describing my time reporting on Israel for the Associated Press. “Is there anything left to say about Israel and Gaza? Newspapers this summer have been full of little else,” I wrote at the time. “Television viewers see heaps of rubble and plumes of smoke in their sleep.” It wasn’t the volume of coverage that unsettled me in the summer of 2014. I was writing about something that had gone unreported, and which has done much to shape reality in the decade since—a change not in the news but in the newsroom. 

The essays—the first for Tablet, and the second for The Atlantic—described my experience as a reporter watching from the inside as a major news organization lost its way in one of the world’s most heavily covered stories. To this day, nothing I’ve ever written has been quoted back at me more often. The essays go back into circulation every time there’s an explosion of violence here, and it happened again after the Hamas attack of October 7. I reread them recently, as the new tragedy in Gaza balloons into a moment that feels like a civilization shift, as rallies against “Zionism” become a staple of life in cities across the liberal West, and as a war launched by Muslim fundamentalists is recast with global success as a story of Jewish brutality, influence, and mendacity.

The most important thing I saw during my time as a correspondent in the American press, it seemed to me, was happening among my colleagues. The practice of journalism—that is, knowledgeable analysis of messy events on Planet Earth—was being replaced by a kind of aggressive activism that left little room for dissent. The new goal was not to describe reality, but to usher readers to the correct political conclusion, and if this sounds familiar now, it was both new and surprising to the younger version of myself who was lucky to get a job with the AP’s Jerusalem bureau in 2006. 

The story I found myself part of proposed, in effect, that the ills of Western civilization—racism, militarism, colonialism, nationalism—were embodied by Israel, which was covered more heavily than any other foreign country. (Israel takes up one one-hundredth of one percent of the surface of the world, and one fifth of one percent of the landmass of the Arab world.) 

By selectively emphasizing some facts and not others, by erasing historical and regional context, and by reversing cause and effect, the story portrayed Israel as a country whose motivations could only be malevolent, and one responsible not only for its own actions but also for provoking the actions of its enemies. The activist-journalists, I found, were backed up by an affiliated world of progressive NGOs and academics who we referred to as experts, creating a thought loop nearly impervious to external information. All of this had the effect of presenting a mass audience with a supposedly factual story that had a powerful emotional punch and a familiar villain. 

“The lasting importance of this summer’s war, I believe, doesn’t lie in the war itself,” I wrote as the fighting petered out in 2014. “It lies instead in the way the war has been described and responded to abroad, and the way this has laid bare the resurgence of an old, twisted pattern of thought and its migration from the margins to the mainstream of Western discourse—namely, a hostile obsession with Jews.” It’s possible that I understated the problem.